R4SFF

Monday, October 19, 2015

H.G. Wells Predicting the Future

In 1932, H.G. Wells published a short story "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper" in which a man obtains a copy of the London Evening Standard from November 10th, 1971. You can read the story courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

The story describes the response of Brownlow, who

found himself surveying a real evening newspaper, which was dealing, so far as he could see at the first onset, with the affairs of another world.

What was this world like? How did H.G. Wells imagine the future? Some details he got exactly correct, even if he was off on the timing of when they would arrive. The newspaper was in color with color photographs. The fashions displayed people with wearable gadgets. Birth rates have declined. Animal extinctions continue (although thankfully not gorilla's as of yet).

In other respects he was quite wrong. Although geothermal energy is making progress, it is not true even today that "The Age of Combustion has Ended!" Body clothing has not been reduced. Although the Soviet Union has fallen, The U.K. and U.S.A. remain. Wells was wrong to think of a world with a supranational government in which

the great game of sovereign states will be over.

Perhaps most laughably to my mind, although perhaps I should be more depressed than amused by this, Wells was wrong to think that newspapers and public discourse would have become much more sophisticated:

There was much more space given to scientific work and to inventions than is given in any contemporary paper. There were diagrams and mathematical symbols, he says, but he did not look into them very closely because he could not get the hang of them. "Frightfully highbrow, some of it," he said.

A more intelligent world for our grandchildren evidently, and also, as the pictures testified, a healthier and happier world.

That Wells was unable to do better predicting the future is not at all surprising. In fact, I am quite impressed with how well he did. As he points out himself, some inventions are so sudden and so transforming it is almost impossible to predict their occurrence or their implications:

After all, in 1831 very few people thought of railway or steamship travel, and in 1871 you could already go round the world in eighty days by steam, and send a telegram in a few minutes to nearly every part of the earth. Who would have thought of that in 1831? Revolutions in human life, when they begin to come, can come very fast. Our ideas and methods change faster than we know.

The blog Futility Closet points out that on the actual November 10th, 1971, the Evening Standard ran the headline “The Prophecy H.G. Wells Made About Tonight’s Standard”. They even tried to track down the supposed intended recipient of the newspaper from the story: a Mr. Evan O’Hara. Unfortunately, they found no trace of him.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

On Extremism

Will Shetterly has attracted more than his share of opprobrium within the SFF community. I have no intention of going into that right now.

Recently he posted an interesting quote explaining the attractions of extremism that he attributes to John Cleese:

The biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel GOOD because it provides you with enemies.

Let me explain. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in YOU. Attractive, isn't it?

So, if you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you're only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons! And if it wasn't for them, you'd actually be good natured, and courteous, and rational all the time. So, if you want to FEEL GOOD, become an extremist.

You can strut around, abusing people, and telling them you could eat them for breakfast and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth. A fighter for the greater good. And not the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are.

—John Cleese

Shetterly argues, I think convincingly, that this helps us understand some of the acrimony experienced within SFF fandom over the past year.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Friday, October 16, 2015

What book got you to become a fan of SFF?

In a recent Mind Meld column at SF Signal entitled The Books That Made Us Love Science Fiction and Fantasy, Paul Weimer has posted the responses he received when he posed a bunch of authors, editors and fans:

Tell me what book got you to become a fan of SFF, and why?

The resulting list is fascinating, as are the reasons advanced for why the books had such an impact. I recommend you go read it all, but here are the authors and the books they cited as influential:

Gail Carriger: Tamora Pierce Song of the Lioness.
Tansy Rayner Roberts: David Eddings The Belgariad.
Yoon Ha Lee: Anne McCaffrey Dragonflight.
Rachel Swirsky: cites work generally by Sheila Williams, Anne McCaffrey, Bradbury and Eleanor Cameron.
Beth Cato: Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance series.
Tehani Wessely: lists a range of work but places Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon at the top.
Alan Baxter: also lists a number of books but focuses on C J Cherryh’s The Chronicles of Morgaine.
Sarah Hendrix: Madeleine L’Engle Wrinkle in Time.
Olivia Waite: Anne McCaffrey “The Smallest Dragonboy.”
Anthony Cardno: Robert Silverberg To Open the Sky.
Ann Vandermeer: The Oz books by L. Frank Baum.
Sarah Williams: Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Pamela Sargent: Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination.
Jaye Wells: C.S. Lewis The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Mike Glyer: lists a lot of books, from which I will emphasize the Lensman series by E. E. “Doc” Smith about which he says
there I found the line that hooked me on science fiction forever — “Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other….”
Sabrina Vourvolias: C.S. Lewis The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Kerry Schafer: Tolkien The Fellowship of the Ring.
Jim Henley: Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Silverberg and Bova.
Melanie Meadors: Robin McKinley The Hero and the Crown.
M.L. Brennan: lists The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, Dune by Frank Herbert, The Belgariad by David Eddings, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, The Darkangel Trilogy by Meredith Ann Pierce.
Meghan B.: Tamora Pierce Lioness and the Woman Who Rides Like A Man.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood: Alexei Panshin Rite of Passage.

Usually, when I find lists of recommended or favorite readings online, I am a little embarassed by how few of them I have read. Not this list, where I must have read 80%. Perhaps it reflects the ages of the people responding?

I was also a little surprised to find how similar peoples lists were. In addition to overlap mentioned above, many people responded with other books they loved that often drawn from the same small list: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Ender's Game, Dune, as well as various books by David Eddings, Raymond Feist, Terry Brooks, C S Lewis and Anne McCaffrey.

The one book (or set of books) that was surprising in its omission was Ursula Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea which was extremely influential to me and to many of my friends. I think of it as our generations Harry Potter, and recommend it to anyone (along with Dune, McCaffrey, and Ender's Game, it topped my list of recommendations for younger readers).

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Sociology in SFF

As an economist, I am often perplexed by the way economics is portrayed in SFF. Although it is sometimes done well---here is one list of SFF books in which economics makes an appearance in a way that passes muster with some economists---it is often done badly.

I suspect professionals in other fields must feel similarly. For example, historians must be driven crazy by what they perceive to be misrepresentations of various historical episodes, while political scientists no doubt think that the political intrigues described in some books are hopelessly naive, or else overly elaborate.

With regard to the discipline of sociology, Hannah Emery, who has a PhD in sociology from Berkeley, has written an interesting short article On Dothraki and House Elves: Developing Fantasy Cultures over on Dan Koboldt's blog. Although written as a set of tips on world building, reading between the lines I think we can see some things in SFF novels that must drive sociologists mad.

Emery's main point is that, when it comes to believable world building, it is not enough to simply develop a culture (or cultures) for that world.

if you want your story to portray a realistic society, building “the culture” won’t be enough, for three reasons: cultural drift, cultural exchange, and deviance.

What Emery mean by these terms?

Cultural Drift

Cultures will evolve over time, and vary across space. If a culture is old, and if it covers a large territory, we can expect a greater degree of cultural drift. This can lead to the coexistence of diametrically opposed cultural mores:

There’s a lot of talk both inside and outside the United States about “American culture,” You know, the culture of Big Macs and organic local farmers’ markets, of abstinence pledges and the reality show Sixteen and Pregnant, of – you get the idea. Even in “the information age,” the US still has regional cultures. If you’re familiar with those cultures, you might make assumptions about someone from the Bay Area, or the Bible Belt, or Brooklyn, but you’d likely realize there’s not much you can assume about someone from “America.” The country’s just too big.

...

Over time and distance, the Vulgar Latin spoken in the Roman Empire fragmented into the very-different Romance languages. Culture fragments, too, and it also changes in response to local conditions.

...

Failing to take cultural drift into account seems to be particularly common when you’re developing non-human cultures (centaurs are noble, dwarves are gruff, elves are arrogant, you know the drill). One exercise to help you get around this is to think about which of the cultural traits you’ve developed are actually rooted in biology: those are the ones most likely to be universal across cultures. For instance, almost all human children are raised in family groups; almost all humans subsist on some combination of plant matter and animal protein; almost all humans will have sexual partners at some point in their adult life. But think how many variations exist on those themes if you widen the scope to all human cultures.

Cultural Exchange

When cultures meet, they interact and exchange ideas. Sometimes, an idea that originated in one culture can become inextricably linked to another.

For example, tomatoes are a main feature of Italian cooking. But

there were no tomatoes in Europe until the sixteenth century. They originated in southern Mexico, and came to Europe with returning Spanish explorers. Same thing with chili peppers, brought first to Europe and then to Asia from the “New World.” People traveled, they saw new things, and they adopted those things as their own.

Intelligent creatures are curious. If people from your primary culture have contact with other cultures, whether through war, alliance, or just casual encounters, some parts of those other cultures will trickle home with them. Some American GIs who served in Vietnam came home with a new taste for Southeast Asian cuisine; some sub-Saharan Africans who heard the preaching of European missionaries decided this Jesus stuff might be worth exploring.

Food and religion are particularly good examples of cultural exchange, because they’re pretty portable and fairly resistant to extinction. When people travel to a new country, they bring their cuisine and their faith along, and even when immigrants assimilate, food and faith tend to persist longer than other things. But the longer an export is immersed in a new culture, the further it’s likely to drift from its original source material. Christianity in Africa looks quite different from Christianity in Europe; “Chinese food” in the United States is very different from Cantonese or Szechuan cuisine. Blame cultural drift again, along with syncretism (a term most commonly applied to religion): combining new cultural elements with ones that are already working well. East and Southeast Asia are notorious for this, with many people’s religious practices incorporating elements of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and local indigenous traditions without the practitioners seeing any contradiction.

Cultural exchange is particularly common where two cultures bump up against each other often. This is why “ethnic” food is most prevalent in big cities that are common immigrant destinations, and why there are more Mexican restaurants in the southwestern US (i.e., close to Mexico) than in New England. If your story’s set in a border town, it will almost by definition not be monocultural.

When Two Cultures Meet

Finally, of course, there’s cultural exchange in the most direct sense of the word. When two human cultures first meet, there are two things you can almost always count on: they’ll try to kill each other, and they’ll make babies. Even if there are taboos against intercultural sexual relations – even if it’s punishable by death – it’ll still happen. And the children who come from those unions will have to be categorized within the societies who could potentially claim them, and decide for themselves what cultural space they’re going to occupy.

Which brings me to my final bullet point. I suspect that right now, someone reading this is preparing to protest that your fantasy culture is the exception, that your cultural authorities (king, warlord, high priests, whoever) maintain a policy of strict isolationism, so there’s no opportunities for cultural exchange, and they’re immortal, so there’s limited opportunity for cultural drift because the story coming from the top never changes. To you, I say that even in the most authoritarian societies, there will always be the crazy ones.

Deviance

Whatever a cultures dominant social norms may be, there will always be those members of society that deviate from it.

Whatever norms, beliefs and values your society has, there will be people who stray from them. People who don’t believe God created the universe, or don’t believe that the Big Bang did. People who sever ties with their family of origin, or who live with their parents until they’re forty. Straying from the mainstream – whatever that mainstream might be – is what sociologists call deviance.

Characters Breaking the Norm

There are many forms of deviation and most are neither illegal nor regarded as immoral. Some might be viewed as eccentricities, and many may make members of the dominant culture uncomfortable.

Your society will have all these forms of deviance. There will be people who commit crimes (actions that a government deems undesirable for one reason or another); there will be people who do immoral things (often actions that a religious authority deems undesirable); and there will be people who do weird things, and think outside the box. The motivations for these actions could be anything you can imagine. What if there was a Dothraki in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire who was allergic to horses? What if there was a Hogwarts house elf who had a vision from the gods and started preaching that the house elves needed to go join Voldemort’s cause, or that they needed to use their magic destroy the humans?

The people in your world will be born into a culture, and that culture will shape their thoughts and beliefs and actions. But no thinking person can conform completely to every aspect of their culture, no matter how constrictive that culture is. You’ll always have variability, and that’s something to consider when developing fantasy cultures.

This might all sound like a lot of work, and I’m certainly not suggesting you come up with a hundred incarnations of every culture that could potentially appear in your story. But for the main cultures, I’d suggest it’s worth thinking about these things. Because the more nuance you can put in your cultures, the more realistic they’ll feel to your readers – and who knows, you may even find opportunities for new stories! The messianic house elf seems like it has potential to me.

I'd be interested to know if Emery has any examples of books and/or worlds that she feels were especially well done from the point of view of a sociologist.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Book Review: Scott Hawkins The Library at Mount Char

Scott Hawkins's The Library at Mount Char is a disturbing and strange little book. It begins with a great opening sequence and a pretty good opening line (see here for some other great opening lines):

Carolyn, blood-drenched and barefoot, walked alone down the two-lane stretch of blacktop that the Americans called Highway 78.

This effectively sucked me in, and I was kept reading along by the far-better-than-average writing quality. But at the end I was left dissatisfied. And it took me a while to adequately explain to myself why.

The novel primarily follows Carolyn, orphaned in some kind of disaster, and adopted along with 11 other orphans by Father, a godlike being who has lived for many tens of thousands of years. Over these years, he has accumulated his wisdom into a library and each of the children is assigned the task of learning a catalog comprising roughly one-twelfth of the library. Carolyn learns languages, Jennifer learns medicine, David learns warcraft and murder, Michael learns of animals, and so on. Each is forbidden to learn another's catalog.

When we join the action, Father has gone missing and the orphans find themselves barred from approaching the library. Separately and together the authors set out to find out what happened. As we go along we learn of the astounding cruelty with which Father educated them and the terrible consequences that this has wrought on their psyche's. Indeed, one of my problems with the book was the very detailed depiction of murder, torture and rape. These acts appear to have had a purpose; Father had a plan in mind. But it emerges slowly that the orphans have their own plans, too, and that one of them may be behind Father's disappearance.

I usually try to keep my reviews as spoiler free as possible, but in order to understand my problems with the book I need to delve a little bit deeper into the plot. And so, beware this warning: SPOILERS BELOW.

One of the things that makes it difficult to like Carolyn, the book's protagonist, is that she takes a number of actions that are both staggering in their cruelty and appalling as regards the indifference she shows to both human and animal suffering; people and animals are disposable to her. The fact that the actions are all in support of her plan---it emerges that she is behind Father's disappearance---is somewhat lessened by the knowledge that Father is a despicable creature, but only somewhat because Carolyn's motive is purely and simply revenge for one of Father's acts of cruelty. This is, of course, part of Hawkins's point; the assumption of godlike powers combined with Father's training has made Carolyn lose her humanity.

About two-thirds of the way through the book, Carolyn's plans succeed and are finally revealed. There is a bit of a god from the machine thing going on here; we never get to see understand Carolyn's implementation of her plan as it goes along so that when it works it all comes as a bit of a surprise. This is explained by the fact that, because her opponents have some power to read minds, she was not able to think about her plans. But it left this reader unsatisfied, as though having watched a heist movie in which the preparations for the heist all occurred off screen, and suddenly the protagonist ends up in possession of the stolen goods.

The remainder of the book, then, sees Carolyn grappling with the loss of her humanity with the help of Steve, a childhood friend from before the incident that killed her parents. During this process, she brings Father back to life and it is revealed that this was all his plan, too. Carolyn seems to accept that the cruelty was necessary as a way of grooming her to take his place and they are reconciled. Again, I found this ending unsatisfying. I think Hawkins wants us to see Carolyn's forgiveness of Father as necessary for her to recapture her humanity. And it certainly does not come easy to her. But I nonetheless found Carolyn's transition from little-ball-of-revenge-fueled-hate to wise-and-magnanimous-future-god-of-our-world a little too abrupt. There is not enough questioning of Father's methods, and whether alternative teaching methods would have worked; whether the callous disregard of people's lives and suffering was worth it. It is simply accepted that these things needed to happen.

Is this intended as some form of religious allegory? Should we accept the suffering in the world as just a part of god's plan? I have heard that message before, and do not need to hear it again. In fact, the greatest disappointment of all was that in the end I just did not care about the answers to these questions at all.

Let me stress that the book does have some redeeming features. The premise is intriguing, the writing is very good (I zipped through the book in a couple of days), and the characters are unforgettable. But to fully enjoy that you have to look past the torture porn, the deus ex machina, and the religious allegory. I wasn't fully able to do so, which is why this receives a rating of "decent" ...

R⁴ Rating: 6 out of 10.

R⁴SFF